The Coon Caricature

The coon caricature is one of the most insulting of all anti-black caricatures. The
name itself, an abbreviation of raccoon, is dehumanizing. As with Sambo, the coon
was portrayed as a lazy, easily frightened, chronically idle, inarticulate, buffoon.
The coon differed from the Sambo in subtle but important ways. Sambo was depicted
as a perpetual child, not capable of living as an independent adult. The coon acted
childish, but he was an adult; albeit a good-for-little adult. Sambo was portrayed
as a loyal and contented servant. Indeed, Sambo was offered as a defense for slavery
and segregation. How bad could these institutions have been, asked the racialists,
if blacks were contented, even happy, being servants? The coon, although he often
worked as a servant, was not happy with his status. He was, simply, too lazy or too
cynical to attempt to change his lowly position. Also, by the 1900s, Sambo was identified
with older, docile blacks who accepted Jim Crow laws and etiquette; whereas coons
were increasingly identified with young, urban blacks who disrespected whites. Stated
differently, the coon was a Sambo gone bad.

The prototypical movie coon was Stepin Fetchit, the slow-talking, slow-walking, self-demeaning
nitwit. It took his character almost a minute to say: "I'se be catchin' ma feets nah,
Boss." Donald Bogle (1994), a cinema historian, lambasted the coon, as played by Stepin
Fetchit and others:

Before its death, the coon developed into the most blatantly degrading of all black
stereotypes. The pure coons emerged as no-account niggers, those unreliable, crazy,
lazy, subhuman creatures good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens,
shooting crap, or butchering the English language. (p. 8)

The coon caricature was born during American slavery. Slave masters and overseers
often described slaves as "slow," "lazy," "wants pushing," "an eye servant," and "trifling."1 The master and the slave operated with different motives: the master desired to obtain
from the slave the greatest labor, by any means; the slave desired to do the least
labor while avoiding punishment. The slave registered his protest against slavery
by running away, and, when that was not possible, by slowing work, doing shoddy work,
destroying work tools, and faking illness. Slave masters attributed the slaves' poor
work performance to shiftlessness, stupidity, desire for freedom, and genetic deficiencies.

The amount of work done by a typical slave depended upon the demands of individual
slave owners and their ability to extract labor. Typically, slaves worked from dawn
to dusk. They were sometimes granted "leisure time" on Saturday or Sunday evenings;
however, this time was spent planting or harvesting their own gardens, washing clothes,
cooking, and cleaning. A slave owner wrote: "I always give them half of each Saturday,
and often the whole day, at which time...the women do their household work; therefore
they are never idle" (Stampp, 1956, pp. 79-80)

Slave owners complained about the laziness of their workers, but the records show
that slaves were often worked hard -- and brutally so. Overseers were routinely paid
commissions, which encouraged them to overwork the slaves. On a North Carolina plantation
an overseer claimed that he was a "'hole hog man rain or shine," and boasted that
the slaves had been worked "like horses." He added, "I'd ruther be dead than be a
nigger on one of these big plantations" (Stampp, 1956, p. 85). After the closing of
the African slave trade, the price of slaves went up, thereby causing some slave owners
and their hired overseers to be more careful in their use of slaves. "The time had
been," wrote one slave owner, "that the farmer could kill up and wear out one Negro
to buy another; but it is not so now. Negroes are too high in proportion to the price
of cotton, and it behooves those who own them to make them last as long as possible"
(Stampp, 1956, p. 81).

Slaves are generally associated with the harvest of cotton; however, slaves worked
in many industries. Almost every railroad in the ante-bellum South was built in part
by slave labor. Slaves worked in sawmills, fisheries, gold mines and salt mines. They
were used as deck hands on river boats. There were slave lumberjacks, construction
workers, longshoremen, iron workers, even store clerks. Slaves monopolized the domestic
services. Some slaves worked as skilled artisans, for example, shoemakers, blacksmiths,
carpenters, mechanics, and barbers. These artisans were generally treated better than
the slaves in the cotton and tobacco fields; therefore, it is not surprising that
the artisans did better work. They included "many ingenious Mechanicks," claimed a
white colonial Georgian, "and as far as they have had opportunity of being instructed,
have discovered as good abilities, as are usually found among [white] people of our
Colony" (Stampp, 1956, p. 63).

The supporters of slavery claimed that blacks were a childlike people unequipped for
freedom. Proslavers acknowledged that some slave masters were cruel, but they argued
that most were benevolent, kind-hearted capitalists who civilized and improved their
docile black wards. From Radical Reconstruction to World War I, there was a national
nostalgia for the "good ol' darkies" who loved their masters, and, according to the
proslavers, rejected or only reluctantly accepted emancipation. In this context, the
conceptualization of the coon was revised. During slavery almost all blacks, especially
men, were sometimes seen as coons, that is, lazy, shiftless, and virtually useless.
However, after slavery, the coon caricature was increasingly applied to younger blacks,
especially those who were urban, flamboyant, and contemptuous of whites. Thomas Nelson
Page, a white writer wrote this in 1904:

Universally, they [white Southerners] will tell you that while the old-time Negroes
were industrious, saving, and when not misled, well-behaved, kindly, respectful, and
self-respecting, and while the remnant of them who remain still retain generally these
characteristics, the "new issue," for the most part, are lazy, thriftless, intemperate,
insolent, dishonest, and without the most rudimentary elements of morality....Universally,
they report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large in sections
in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling a reversion to barbarism.
(p. 80)

At the beginning of the 1900s many whites supported the implementation of Jim Crow
laws and etiquette. They believed that blacks were genetically, therefore permanently,
inferior to whites. Blacks were, they argued, hedonistic children, irresponsible,
and left to their own plans, destined for idleness -- or worse. It was not uncommon
for whites to distinguish between Niggers (Coons and Bucks) and Negroes (Toms, Sambos, and Mammies), and they preferred the latter.

Racial caricatures are undergirded by stereotypes, and the stereotyping of blacks
as coons continued throughout the 20th Century. The pioneer study of racial and ethnic
stereotyping in the United States was conducted in 1933 by Daniel Katz and Kenneth
Braley, two social scientists. They questioned 100 Princeton University undergraduates
regarding the prevailing stereotypes of racial and ethnic groups. Their research concluded
that blacks were consistently described as "superstitious," "happy-go-lucky," and
"lazy." The respondents had these views even though they had little or no contact
with blacks. This study was repeated in 1951, and the negative stereotyping of blacks
persisted (Gilbert). The Civil Rights Movement improved whites' attitudes toward blacks,
but a sizeable minority of whites still hold traditional, racist views of blacks.
An early 1990s study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center found that
the majority of the white, Hispanic, and other non-black respondents displayed negative
attitudes towards blacks. For example, 78 percent said that blacks were more likely
than whites to "prefer to live off welfare" and "less likely to prefer to be self-supporting."
Further, 62 percent said blacks were more likely to be lazy; 56 percent said blacks
were violence-prone; and 53 percent said that blacks were less intelligent than whites
(Duke, 1991). Stated differently: the coon caricature is still being applied to blacks.
Martin Gilens (1999), a Yale University political scientist, argued that many white
Americans believe that blacks receive welfare benefits more often than do whites and
that "the centuries old stereotype of blacks as lazy remains credible for a large
number of white Americans." He claimed that opposition to welfare programs results
from misinformation and racism, with whites assuming that their tax money is being
used to support lazy blacks. Gilens blames, in part, the media. "Pictures of poor
blacks are abundant when poverty coverage is most negative, while pictures of non-blacks
dominate the more sympathetic coverage."

The coon caricature was one of the stock characters among minstrel performers. Minstrel
show audiences laughed at the slow-talking fool who avoided work and all adult responsibilities.
This transformed the coon into a comic figure, a source of bitter and vulgar comic
relief. He was sometimes renamed "Zip Coon" or "Urban Coon." If the minstrel skit
had an ante-bellum setting, the coon was portrayed as a free black; if the skit's
setting postdated slavery, he was portrayed as an urban black. He remained lazy and
good-for-little, but the minstrel shows depicted him as a gaudy dressed "Dandy" who
"put on airs." Unlike Mammy and Sambo, Coon did not know his place. He thought he
was as smart as white people; however, his frequent malapropisms and distorted logic
suggested that his attempt to compete intellectually with whites was pathetic. His
use of bastardized English delighted white audiences and reaffirmed the then commonly
held beliefs that blacks were inherently less intelligent. The minstrel coon's goal
was leisure, and his leisure was spent strutting, styling, fighting, avoiding real
work, eating watermelons, and making a fool of himself. If he was married, his wife
dominated him. If he was single, he sought to please the flesh without entanglements.

Hollywood films extended the brutalization inherent in the coon image. The first cinematic
coon appeared in Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (Selig, 1905), a stupendously racist portrayal of two dimwitted and stuttering buffoons.
Several notable slapstick "coon shorts" were produced in 1910-1911, including How Rastus Got His Turkey (Wharton, 1910) (he stole it) and Chicken Thief (1911). In the blackface comedy Coon Town Suffragettes (Lubin, 1914), a group of domineering mammies organize a "movement" to keep their
good-for-nothing husbands at home. These early coons laid the foundation for the "great"
movie coons of the 1930s and 1940s.

In the 1929 Fox film Hearts in Dixie (Sloane), Chloe is married to Gummy, a "languid, shiftless husband whose 'mysery'
in his feet prevents him from being of any earthly good as far as work is concerned,
although once away from his wife's eye he can shuffle with the tirelessness and lanky
abandon of a jumping jack" (Leab, 1976, p. 86). Chloe dies of swamp fever, and Gummy
remarries. The new wife is portrayed as a shrew because she tries to force Gummy to
work. This movie was a comedy, and most of the humor centered around Gummy's attempts
to avoid work and his coon dialogue, for example, "I ain't askin you is you ain't.
I is askin you is you is." The actor who played Gummy was Stepin Fetchit, the "greatest"
coon actor of all time.

Stepin Fetchit was born Lincoln Theodore Perry on May 30, 1892. A medicine show and
vaudeville performer, he arrived in Hollywood in the 1920s. Perry claimed that he
got the name Fetchit from a racehorse that won him money. However, he also told an
interviewer that he came to Hollywood as a member of a comedy team know as "Step and
Fetch It," and later adopted a variant of the name. His first featured movie role
using the name Stepin Fetchit was in MGM's In Old Kentucky (Stahl, 1927). Whether as Gummy, Stepin Fetchit, or other names, he essentially performed
the same role: the arch-coon. Daniel J. Leab (1976), a cinema historian, said this:

Fetchit became identified in the popular imagination as a dialect-speaking, slump-shouldered,
slack-jawed character who walked, talked, and apparently thought in slow motion. The
Fetchit character overcame this lethargy only when he thought that a ghost or some
nameless terror might be present; and then he moved very quickly indeed. (p. 89)

Fetchit was the embodiment of the nitwit black man. As with the Zip Coon and Urban
Coon, this old-fashioned coon character could never correctly pronounce a multisyllabic
word. He was portrayed as a dunce. In Stand Up and Cheer (Sheehan & MacFadden, 1934), he was tricked into thinking that a "talking" penguin
was really Jimmy Durante. Fetchit, scratching his head, eyes bulging, portrayed the
coon so realistically that whites thought they were seeing a real racial type. His
coon portrayal was aided by his appearance. According to Donald Bogle (1994), a film
historian:

His appearance, too, added to the caricature. He was tall and skinny and always had
his head shaved completely bald. He invariably wore clothes that were too large for
him and that looked as if they had been passed down from his white master. His grin
was always very wide, his teeth very white, his eyes very widened, his feet very large,
his walk very slow, his dialect very broken. (P. 41)

Fetchit's coon characters were racially demeaned and often verbally and even physically
abused by white characters. In David Harum (Cruze, 1934) he was traded to Will Rogers along with a horse. He was traded twice
more in the movie. In Judge Priest (Wurtzel & Ford, 1934), he was pushed, shoved, and verbally berated by Will Rogers;
even worse, his character was barely intelligible, scratched his head in an apelike
manner, and followed Rogers around like an adoring pet.

In black communities, Stepin Fetchit remains a synonym for a bowing and scraping black
man. In 1970 he sued CBS unsuccessfully for $3 million, charging defamation of character
for the way he was portrayed in the television documentary Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed (Rooney, 1968). "It was Step," he claimed, "who elevated the Negro to the dignity
of a Hollywood star. I made the Negro a first-class citizen all over the world...somebody
it was all right to associate with. I opened all the theaters" (Bogle, 1994, p. 44).
That statement is hyperbole; however, Stepin Fetchit was a talented actor who added
depth -- albeit, slight -- to the movie coon's portrayal.

What is his legacy? He was the first black actor to receive top billing in movies,
and one of the first millionaire black actors. He spawned imitators, most notably,
Willie Best (Sleep 'n Eat) and Mantan Moreland, the scared, wide-eyed manservant of
Charlie Chan. In 1978 he was elected to the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. But he
will always be remembered as the lazy, barely literate, self-demeaning, white man's
black. He attempted a comeback in the 1950s, but it was unsuccessful; his coon caricature
then seemed merely embarrassing. In the late 1960s he converted to the Black Muslim
faith.